This morning, a Michigander friend of mine texted to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving. Her husband and their roommate work at Walmart, and so I asked her whether they had to work today. It took my friend a few hours to respond, but I already knew the answer—as long as I’ve known them, they’ve both had to work on and around most major holidays. Their Thanksgiving has traditionally been on Thursday morning or Wednesday evening to make sure that they have some time to celebrate as a family before they get called in to work to get things ready for the capitalist rush that will come on Black Friday—and increasingly, on Thursday night.

Anyone who doesn’t accept that gender is socially constructed needs to explain to me why one of the cartoon turkeys on my Thanksgiving 5k shirt is wearing lipstick and a pearl necklace just so we know the race is open to women.

What a joke.

Masnick’s frustration here is fun to read.

Love this article. This year, I’ve been craving Advent since Halloween ended, and I’ve seen a justice and peace element to Advent since I first started celebrating it, so there’s a lot for me here.

I’ve read a LOT of Doctorow in 2023—including Walkaway twice, Red Team Blues twice, and relistening to Little Brother—so I can’t help but place this hopeful solarpunk novel in the context of these others.

Even though The Lost Cause touches on some of the same themes as Walkaway, I like the latter book a lot better, though perhaps because it feels less “real” than a book about paramilitary Maga Clubs and impending climate catastrophe. Yet Red Team Blues is also more grounded than Walkaway, but I enjoyed it more than The Lost Cause, so it’s hard to say why this book didn’t click with me as some of Doctorow’s other writing.

I’ve been reading a number of these stories as they’ve been coming out but without posting about them. This is as good a chance as any to express my concern.

I’ve been waiting for Masnick’s response to this, and it’s good.

Over the summer, I wrote about a favorite Community of Christ hymn. Without repeating the entire post here, one of my favorite things about it is that it was never written as a hymn. Rather, it was a song written by a folk song as a call for peace that got adopted into the Community of Christ hymnbook in 2013.

I thought about these details last weekend as I was listening to Ici-bas, a favorite song by French Canadian folk rock band Les cowboys fringants—I figured that this song would make for a pretty good hymn, too, even if it probably has a bit more swearing than your typical hymn. I’ve taken inspiration from this song for quite a while. Back in May 2022, I actually submitted the following story to Community of Christ’s Daily Bread series of morning devotionals (though it has not yet appeared, so maybe folks at World Church don’t agree with my evaluation):

What the hell, Musk.

What a mess Musk has made Twitter into.

Rereading this book after a few years, and it continues to be great! The organization could be more clear, and it sometimes feels repetitive, but it provides important historical detail that allows the reader to understand Latter Day Saint priesthood in new ways.

This is an excellent, thorough book on the purity system of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the excommunications of the “September Six” and many others for their violations of that purity system. I bought the book out of personal interest, but I think it will be professionally valuable as well. I knew much of what was in the book, but what I didn’t know was important, and I am grateful for the volume and hope that many will read it to learn about this important period in Mormon history. As Patterson notes, though, it’s not just history; her conclusion reflecting on how these episodes have their echoes in the present is especially good.

Torn on this article. I think you can choose to patronize a platform without being associated with its worst users, so I wonder if the Fuentes connection is overstated. That said, choosing to livestream on Rumble is absolutely pandering to Fuentes-type right-wingers, so it’s a bad, bad move.

Yesssss! Andy Beshear, governeer! So very happy about this.

I always assumed “Dem Bones” was one of those vaguely educational children’s songs (meant to teach anatomy?) and was always confused by the line “hear the word of the Lord.” I was yesterday years old when I finally realized the song is a reference to that story in Ezekiel.

Got to do early voting at the library today, which neatly combines a lot of my favorite things into a single experience.

I did not read this book as one is supposed to. It’s a collection of daily Advent and Christmas reflections, but I listened to the audiobook well before Advent started and with no pauses in between individual reflections. I’m sure that takes away from the experience, but I enjoyed what I heard and plan to read more Bonhoeffer.

I’ve been meaning to reread this since I first listened to the audiobook, which I started as soon as it was released. It’s not my favorite Doctorow, but it’s still him at his best: The book is opinionated, exciting, and full of specific, compelling details. I like it a lot.

I know it’s not Advent yet, but I’m feeling impatient for Advent, and if I start checking out Advent books from Libby/the library now, I won’t have to compete with people for them in a month when Advent really starts.

When I took a job at the University of Kentucky, a former professor (and boss) of mine at BYU told me to look up a specific French professor on campus, whom she’d also taught (and supervised) some time earlier. I ran into him several months later at a stake conference (this was, obviously, when I was still attending Latter-day Saint meetings), and we bonded over what it was like to work under our boss. Because Mormons tend to assume that there’s no way to learn a language without speaking that language on your mission (this is partly true for me, but I also got my French to a damn respectable level through coursework before I ever put on the tag, so I still resent the assumption), we wound up talking about missions, and so we ended up bonding even more about our shared experience serving in the now-defunct Switzerland Geneva Mission.

Thinking a lot today about Leo Tolstoy’s argument that because we cannot agree on when violence is justified, we must agree that violence is never justified. It still seems to me like a bold claim to make, but I’m feeling more and more convinced by it.

Even more than AI’s potential to replace humans in the name of saving money, I think we need to talk about the way companies are exploiting humans to save money—so that it can train AI.

Hear me out: What if the moral of Dr. Strangelove for the 2020s is that automation and efficiency aren’t always good things?

I generally like my local paper, but I’m annoyed by all of the feel-good “someone won big at the lottery!” stories they publish. Lotteries are regressive taxes, and celebrating winners helps conceal that fact.